ONBOARDING

Punk City is a Telegram bot game: just open a chat with @punkcity and viola — no download or signup required. This low-effort conversion benefit made new user onboarding a key element of my game design roadmap. Without it, we were losing thousands of conversions daily. My new design offered rewards, retention hooks to keep players for a second session, and a pre-determined first purchase notification determined by segmented user churn analytics.

ECONOMIC MODEL

The client requested me to improve their metrics across the board. The game had achieved early marketing success and needed feature development to improve conversion, retention, and sales. With no prior documentation available, I developed an economic model that determined which features had high ROI potential. With this knowledge, I turned down a request to fix one feature that didn't (and wouldn't) drive revenue and saved us a month of work. Instead, I prioritized improving core revenue drivers, using data provided by my economic model and rapidly growing GDD as validators.

FEATURE DESIGN (design docs, UX, UI wireframes, competitive analysis, statistical analysis, economics)

During my work with the team, we built several features, popular with competitors, and improved them with our own flare. A one-day competitive analysis cut down our developers' iteration time by at least a week, and the Battle Royale feature became instantly popular! Because this feature addressed players' need for additional gameplay options, retention and sales both rose significantly. I co-developed several other features: Missions, Leagues with divisions, and Lottery mechanic improvements. Each feature proposal included:

• Potential prototyping methods to cut development costs.
• Competitive analysis, with successful implementations.
• Estimated potential ROI.
• Design documents + Miro or Figma UI/UX boards. 
• Economic modeling to ensure player retention and sales.

LOOT BOXES

My contract work with the client began with a request to lengthen user retention and LTV, so I designed 6 monthly loot boxes introducing new gameplay elements each month. I also rebalanced existing loot using each item's statistical win rates. This was the fastest way to deepen the gameplay mechanics of a rock-paper-scissors game and provide long-term value to the player base. I paid careful attention to the statistics of each item, ensuring they were balanced compared to previous content. I also developed fallback solutions, in the event that we had to 'nerf' or 'buff' each item. The loot boxes deepened the strategy of the game and gave my teammates a chance to work on fresh new content, which everyone enjoyed. But the implementation phase was the most exciting part: I announced our 6-month content drop and users gave open community feedback about over or underbalanced items from each set. We worked together as a community to address the fairest solution (one that didn't prevent whales from contributing heavily and also gave new or casual users the chance to win without paying heavily out of pocket). Getting so much community feedback was good for marketing, and our understanding of the user journey.